I was first introduced to Viktor Koen's work taking a digital art class. Throughout all of his series, he maintains a constant dark, clockwork, archaic, scifi theme. Each piece has a rusty violence either rumbling just below the surface or shown outright. Scrap pieces of metal, x-ray images, and other oddities compose an eclectic portfolio.
One of my favorite series of his shows the main villains and social engineers from the Jorge Luis Borges short story Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius written in 1947. Koen's response to the dystopian story, his series The Makers of Tlon, shows the aforementioned 'big brother' figures with transparent bodies with strange pieces of machinery and flowing lines coming from their bodies. Koen discusses how his series exposes the true nature of this characters past their literal, physical form. The villains and their story are intended as warnings to possible utopian/dystopian futures. Here are some examples from the series:
The rest of his work follows the similarly dark theme mentioned before. Most of his pieces seem to be warnings of some sort or another: warnings against a dystopian future, warnings against the unseen effects of war, etc. His art is intended to unsettle the audience in order to get their attention and effectively deliver the desired warning. His work, in its dark and quirky way, definitely got my attention, and I'll be looking at his prints a lot while working to create a strong theme in my work for the coming semester.
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